Watch this BBC clip of fish and frogs living out of water, featuring the lung fish, a burrowing desert frog, and the thorny devil lizard.
This is beautiful
(via sagansense)
How Grapefruit Can Kill You
If you love grapefruit and are on certain medications, think twice! Anthony shows us how it could kill you.
by DNews Channel.
Maybe the medication isn’t as “sophisticated” as we pretend is
This schematic diagram of the rock cycle shows the relationship between magma and sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous rock
(via thescienceofreality)
This is the world’s smallest snowman - at 10 micrometres across, it’s only 1/5th the width of a human hair. The tiny guy was made from two tin beads used to calibrate electron microscope astigmatism. The eyes and smile were milled using a focused ion beam, and the nose, which is under 1 µm wide (or 0.001 mm), is ion beam deposited platinum.
Yea science! Yeah art!
(via flippedpancake)
Scientists successfully generate gasoline out of thin air
Breakthrough technology takes carbon, hydrogen and oxygen from CO2 and water in the air to create methanol and then converts it into gasoline.
Genetically Engineered Neurons Light Up When Firing
In a scientific first that could help us better understand how signals travel in the brain, a researcher of natural sciences at Harvard has created neurons that light up as they fire.
Despite the fact that almost every science animation ever created has shown neurons to light up, in reality there is no obvious visual cue to indicate their electrical activity. The genetically altered neurons use a gene from a Dead Sea microorganism that produces a protein that fluoresces when exposed to the electrical signal in a neuron, allowing researchers to visually trace how signals are transmitted through cells.
The research was led by Adam Cohen, Associate Professor of Natural Sciences, and was published in Nature Methods.
In a Harvard Gazette story, Cohen said of the research: “It’s very exciting. In terms of basic biology, there are a number of things we can now do which we’ve never been able to do. We can see how these signals spread through the neuronal network. We can study the speed at which the signal spreads, and if it changes as the cells undergo changes. We may someday even be able to study how these signals move in living animals.”
(via scinerds)
Hipparchus’s sky catalog found
A famous statue carries the only surviving record of a star catalog lost for 2,000 years.The ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus discovered the precession of the equinoxes, invented the stellar magnitude scale, discovered a nova, and made accurate planetary observations. He also compiled the world’s first star catalog, in 129 b.c. But the catalog vanished in antiquity, and Hipparchus’s only surviving work is his Commentary on the Phaenomena of Aratus and Eudoxus, which describes the celestial constellation figures in detail. (continue reading)
(via scinerds)
New research suggests that human DNA is a virtual biological Internet and superior in many aspects to the artificial one. Could the latest Russian scientific findings help to explain phenomena such as clairvoyance, intuition, spontaneous and remote acts of healing, self healing, affirmation techniques, unusual light, auras, spiritual masters, the mind’s influence on weather patterns and much more? The answer may be yes, and apparently there is even evidence for a whole new type of medicine in which DNA can be influenced and reprogrammed by words and frequencies without cutting out and replacing single genes.
Only 10% of our DNA is being used for building proteins. It is this subset of DNA that is of interest to Western researchers and is being examined and categorized. The other 90% has been called “junk DNA.” The Russian researchers, however, convinced that nature is not dumb, joined linguists and geneticists in a venture to explore the “junk” 90% of DNA. Their findings and conclusions are being called revolutionary!
According to the research, human DNA is not only responsible for the construction of our bodies but also carries out data storage and communication functions. The Russian linguists found that the genetic code, especially in the apparently useless 90%, follows the same rules as all our human languages. To verify this they compared it with the rules of syntax (the way in which words are put together to form phrases and sentences), semantics (the study of meaning in language forms) and the basic rules of grammar.
They found that the alkalines of our DNA follow regular grammar and have set rules just like spoken languages. The implication seems to be that human languages have not appeared randomly but are, in fact, a reflection of our inherent DNA.
Russian biophysicist and molecular biologist Pjotr Garjajev and his colleagues also explored the vibrational behavior of the DNA. The conclusions are complicated but the bottom line was: “Living chromosomes function just like solitonic/holographic computers using the endogenous DNA laser radiation.”
The scientists managed, for example, to modulate certain frequency patterns onto a laser ray and with it influenced the DNA frequency and thus the genetic information itself. Since the basic structure of DNA-alkaline pairs and of language are of the same structure, no DNA decoding is necessary. One can simply use words and sentences of the human language!
Living DNA substance (in living tissue, not in vitro) will always react to language-modulated laser rays and even to radio waves, if the proper frequencies are being used.
While Western researchers cut single genes from the DNA strands and insert them elsewhere, the Russians enthusiastically worked on devices that can influence the cellular metabolism through suitable modulated radio and light frequencies and thus repaired genetic defects.
Garjajev’s research group succeeded in proving that with this method chromosomes damaged by x-rays, for example, can be repaired. They even captured information patterns of a particular DNA and transmitted it onto another, thus reprogramming cells to another genome. For example, they were able to successfully transform frog embryos to salamander embryos simply by transmitting the DNA information patterns!
Over half of the U.S. can get all its power from wind. And at least 32 states can get 25 percent or more of their electricity from wind power within their own borders. This map is updated from a 2009 report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Energy Self-Reliant States. Green is well over 100%, yellow, 75-100%, orange 25-50%, red less than 25%.
River pollution yields textbook example of evolution
IT IS not often that biologists have a chance to watch natural selection in action. The best-known cases—the evolution of resistance to antibiotics in bacteria and to pesticides in insects—are responses to deliberate changes people have made in the environment of the creatures concerned. But mankind has caused lots of accidental changes as well, and these also offer opportunities to study evolution.
Recently, two groups of researchers, one at New York University (NYU) and the other at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, have taken advantage of one of these changes to look at how fish evolve in response to environmental stress. The stress in question is pollution by polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). These chemicals—widely used in the middle decades of the 20th century to manufacture electrical insulation, coolants, sealants and plasticisers—often ended up dumped in lakes, rivers and coastal waters. Eventually, such dumping was banned (in America, this happened in 1977). But PCBs are persistent chemicals, and their effects are felt even today. In particular, they disrupt the immune systems of animals such as fish, cause hormonal imbalances and promote tumours.
As is the way of evolution, however, some fish species have developed resistance to PCB poisoning. Isaac Wirgin, at NYU, and Mark Hahn, at Woods Hole, have been studying PCB-resistant fish, to see how they do it. After that, the two researchers will be able to look at how these populations evolve yet again as the environment is cleaned up.
Kind of old, but still awesome
60-Second Adventures in Thought - Schrödinger’s Cat
This famous experiment tackling quantum theory involves a cat in a potentially lethal box.
Study ‘Philosophy’ at the Open University: http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/arts-and-humanities/philosophy/index.htm
(Source: youtube.com, via skeptv)
Apollo 11 Astronauts Filled Out Customs Form After Return From Moon
MOON ROCK AND MOON DUST SAMPLES.
Psychologists Decipher Brain’s Clever Autofocus Software
It’s something we all take for granted: our ability to look at an object, near or far, and bring it instantly into focus. The eyes of humans and many animals do this almost instantaneously and with stunning accuracy. Now researchers say they are one step closer to understanding how the brain accomplishes this feat.
In an attempt to resolve the question of how humans and animals might use blur to accurately estimate distance, Geisler and Burge used well-known mathematical equations to create a computer simulation of the human visual system. They presented the computer with digital images of natural scenes similar to what a person might see, such as faces, flowers, or scenery, and observed that although the content of these images varied widely, many features of the images—patterns of sharpness and blurriness and relative amounts of detail—remained the same.
The duo then attempted to mimic how the human visual system might be processing these images by adding a set of filters to their model designed to detect these features. When they blurred the images by systematically changing the focus error in the computer simulation and tested the response of the filters, the researchers found that they could predict the exact amount of focus error by the pattern of response they observed in the feature detectors. The researchers say this provides a potential explanation for how the brains of humans and animals can quickly and accurately determine focus error without guessing and checking. Their research appears online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
(via circuitbird)
Diabetic Rats Cured With Their Own Stem Cells
A cure for diabetes could be sitting in our brains. Neural stem cells, extracted from rats via the nose, have been turned into pancreatic cells that can manufacture insulin to treat diabetes.
Beta cells in the pancreas produce insulin, which regulates glucose levels. People with diabetes either have type 1, in which native beta cells are destroyed by the immune system, or type 2, in which beta cells cannot produce enough insulin.
To replace lost or malfunctioning beta cells, Tomoko Kuwabara of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba Science City, Japan, and colleagues turned to neural stem cells in the brain.
(Source: scinerds)
